Travel 1

 

This starts the travel section, never terribly interesting, but here goes.

Even with the blackout curtains we were up early. Dave had paid extra to get us breaky, so we went over to the restaurant and had a surprisingly tasty breakfast – avo toast with poached egg for Dave, and tasty eggs benedict with spinach for me. Walking around the hotel we noticed all sorts of Chinese touches, like statuary and the sweeping roofs with corner decorations, but there’s nothing about the Sanno Marracoonda Inn that explains why. It could be a really nice hotel with some minor upgrades, but it was just fine for our purposes.

The hotel is next to the airport and in a residential neighborhood, so we went for a short walk around the neighborhood which had a couple of schools and a lot of green space. We also saw a highlight reel of the birds we’ve come to love, including a flock of small cockatoos, a single and then a small pack of gallahs, green parrots, ibises, and finally as we were almost back to the hotel, a raven making its usual complaints as it flew by. We had a short relax in the hotel, then packed up and got on the shuttle for our usual early arrival to the airport. Check-in went smoothly with another nice chatty Qantas agent, and we settled in to wait for our flight. We did see something we’d never seen before – Qantas does a lot to make their top mileage frequent flyer and business class customers feel special, and in this case they had their own jetway to the business class section of the plane.

Our flight was uneventful, and our transfer to the international terminal was uneventful, even if it did feel as though we’ve seen all there is to see of the Sydney airport, between the bus ride to the turbo-prop that we took to Tamworth and this one which seemed to go on and on. We arrived at the international terminal with plenty of time to spare – in fact the monitor that displayed the departure times even told us to relax. It was impossible to relax, though, because this is one of those shopping mall duty fee international airports and we used up all our relaxing time window shopping! Highlights included finding small souvenirs for certain nieces and The two-story Mcdonalds with the kitchen on the top floow and a circular chain with clips to get the food downstairs.

Eventually it was time to go to our gate area, where Victor, an employee of the US government, picked us out for a little prescreen. The boarding process was a little chaotic – they boarded their special people first, and then opened the flight to general boarding. To be honest it didn’t seem like it took much longer than doing it by sections. Eventually we were all on board and here we go to Honolulu. We both slept some on the flight, and watching movies seems to make it go faster, and also lots of food and snacks. Once again it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. All during the trip our Qantas flights were delayed, and with a layover in Sydney that was just under 2 hours we’d been a little nervous, but both of our flights were on time. Speaking of time, we left Sydney on Wednesday evening 26/4 and arrived in Honolulu Wednesday morning 4/26.

From the plane you get herded onto the “wiki wiki” busses to go through immigration and baggage claim and customs. Our immigration officer was pretty relaxed and funny, making a big deal of ensuring that the koala I bought at the Perth zoo was not, in fact, a live koala. Baggage claim was a little scary because someone had pulled my bag off the carousel and put it with the business class bags, so we never saw it come through and had started looking around for the lost luggage office. But I went and checked again more carefully in the special luggage section and there it was, so it was through customs (nobody even wanted to talk to us) and then the part where you try to find the ride share pickup area which is always very far away with minimal signage. Our rider zipped us to the hotel and we tried to check in.

Our room wasn’t ready, so we left the bags and went to find some lunch. It was noon and we figured if we ate lunch at lunchtime we could eat dinner at dinnertime and start the system reset. We found a little sushi joint with table service across the street from Waikiki beach, and paid a bit of a premium for the service and location, but the sushi was very tasty and it was exactly the right place to have gone. We still hadn’t heard from the hotel, so we decided to walk to the zoo. On the way we passed a billabong store and Dave picked up a pair of shorts and a short sleeved shirt – he changed into the shorts in the store and was much more comfortable. The zoo is pretty good, lots of native plants, but one of those zoos that only has one or two of something that it should have a pack of. It did have a sloth and a large number of giant tortoises and reptiles, and we saw a rhinoceros peeing, which if you haven’t seen it you need to google it right now.

By now I was very hot and sweaty since I was still wearing jeans, and we decided to head back. We stopped at an ABC store (always a lucky feeling when you find one, she noted sarcastically – they are ubiquitous) and bought some sunscreen, and as we were walking back we got the notification that our room was ready. We checked in and got our bags and took showers and felt Much Better. We didn’t have a lot of time in our room because our uber was coming at 5 to take us to our dinner cruise, a sunset trip to Diamond Head on the Prince Kuhio.

The cruise was nice, the boat very slowly put-putted its way to Diamond Head and back while we enjoyed the sea breeze. The food was meh but it was a very nice evening out, and it didn’t even get too cold. We were thrilled to get back to the hotel and get ready for bed – it was a very long days!